


Desolation

by paeryn



Category: Firefly, Serenity (2005), Young Avengers
Genre: F/M, Verse!AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-19
Updated: 2013-10-19
Packaged: 2017-12-29 20:20:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1009654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paeryn/pseuds/paeryn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After a tragedy brings them together, Kate Bishop and Eli Bradley are on the run from her father and, when the face of their home planet no longer holds sanctuary for them, they take to the stars. But the secrets she stole set them on the path of a previously unknown planet in an isolated pocket of the 'Verse.  There are no unknown planets in the 'Verse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Desolation

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Eli/Kate Fanart](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/29326) by justicarsamaras. 



> This takes place in the Verse!AU, a Firefly/Serenity AU that contains that universe's version of the Young Avengers...but not as you know them.

**T** he stars slid across the glass like greasy smears in the endless void. Ahead, looming in the near distance, was Skeiron. It’s atmosphere was just as he’d heard, a constantly shifting swirl of blues, whites, and greens that seemed beautiful in its chaos. They were still half an hour out, but he decided to go wake Kate in any event. She’d want to see this.

Walking back into the ship’s empty cargo corridor, he headed off to the small row of crew quarters they had jokingly started calling the bunkhouse. It still felt strange, the silence on the ship, except for the gravity drives endless droning and the mechanical sounds of spaceflight. No laughter here, no small arms reaching up so he could gather them close. He shook his head, ran his fingers over the smoothness that was his head. He was lucky that head was still attached to his body, and Kate’s too.

He finally found her, curled in a ball in her sleep in the quarters she’d claimed her own. He knelt down and touched her exposed shoulder just once, with two fingers. Anything more, and waking her might mean he’d never wake again. After a split second, her eyes opened and she unclenched her body, stretching as she lifted her head off the pillows and letting her long, ebony locks fall around her shoulders.

“We’re almost there. It’s almost as pretty as you, Kate. I thought you’d want to take a peek-see before we were too close.”

“You’d be right,” she said, standing and letting her lean form rise in an arc from floor to ceiling once her hands were outstretched above her head.

“Nothing on the sensors seem to indicate why the Alliance has suppressed this world. There’s no settlement records, nothing. Not even Miranda was buried this deep.”

“That’s what worries me, Eli,” Kate said, as she casually dropped the bedclothes she’d risen in and started to dress. She would never admit it, but she got a small thrill at how casually she could flummox the otherwise unencroachable will off the man. Finishing zipping her boots, she stood up clothed and brushed by the man, letting her hand trail across his waist. “Clearly my father’s consortium was involved somehow. The few things I managed to steal off his data-servers before I was run off seemed to stretch back to the founding, even before Miranda. Back when the core worlds were the only successful colonies to start with.”

Returning to the helm of the ship, Kate’s eye grew wide taking in the world that seemed to rise up before them. A bejeweled marble of sea-green and cornflower blue, only the speed of the clouds racing across its surface betrayed anything but beauty and calm. “I don’t see how it’s possible anyone missed this. It’s…huge”

“Actually, Skeiron’s about the size of a medium moon from the Central Core, and it seems to have a strangely elliptical orbit—a slow one. It dips into the system and is then thrown out into the deeps at an angle where it’d be easily missed…” Eli trailed off as he saw Kate’s face. She didn’t like to be corrected—a family trait, of course. Her father hadn’t like being corrected, either. The pain was strong with him today, this radiating emptiness from the center of his gut. Gods, _Theo_. 

“But for so long?” Kate’s lips pursed, partially in disapproval over the lack of enthusiasm her people seemed to have for the adventure she’d come to crave, but also because she’d not seen Eli this engaged in ages. Something about this place was speaking to him. Either that, or the notion of finally being able to pay her father back for what he’d done had lifted his spirits.

“I don’t have any answers, Kate. That was the whole reason for coming here—to get some. Looks like there are still some satellites in orbit, but nothing pings. We’re not being scanned.” As their descent began, she looked out the windows to see the satellites. Ancient, decaying in space, and clearly decommissioned. A surprising amount of debris held a similar orbit. Eli seemed to enjoy the challenge of dodging the pieces as they flew into view, but Kate was more concerned with their origin. How many other ships like theirs had tried to solve this mystery, only to never be heard from again? She strapped herself in tighter in the co-pilot’s chair and did what she could to help, shouting out telemetry and adjusting what shielding and boosters she could.

Once they entered the atmosphere, they knew it was going to be a bumpy ride. The roiling clouds that had been Skeiron’s outer atmosphere weren’t storms in any conventional sense, but there were weather systems within weather systems, and the winds even that high up seemed to be designed to tear anything approaching it apart. Kate’s grip on the controls were rigid, her knuckles white. Eli, however, was laughing as the _Gambit_ shook and was tossed amongst the competing winds.

“This reminds of that one place was stayed in, ‘bout a year ago. Remember? They had those beds, and you didn’t beli…”

“I remember,” Kate responded with clenched teeth, “that mocking me about this had you sleeping alone in that shaking bed. For two days straight.”

Eli let out a whoop, “It was one day. The second night, you decided a shaking bed with me was preferable to a floor that hadn’t been washed in who knows how long.”

Kate couldn’t help but chuckle as her cheeks turned a rare shade of pink. Sometimes, Eli gave as good as he got. It was one of the reasons she’d been attracted to him in the first place, regardless of the repercussions. The right engine decided that was the perfect time to go out, and suddenly they were spinning uncontrollably as they pinwheeled through the clouds towards the surface of the planet. Ice crystals began to spread across the windows of the cockpit, creating branching patterns of frost until the hull was covered. The heat of their descent should’ve stopped that, she thought quickly before Eli jumped out of his seat and raced to the back of the ship.

She was alone at the helm then, left to do what she could while Eli worked his magic to get the engine back online and the thrusters realigned. She wasn’t a natural pilot. Eli had grown up on ships like these, his father a captain on a transport ship not to dissimilar to the _Gambit_. By the age of 12 he probably knew more than most mechanics and captains three times that age. Eli’s brain was a sponge, and if it related to spacecraft, it absorbed all the quicker. She had learned what she could, when she could. The last few years with Eli had been an education in many things, starship navigation being only one of them.

A crackle on the com shocked her out of her concentration, “Try the right rear thruster.”

Kate located the switch and making a quick prayer, flipped it off and then on again. Their spin slowed considerably, but they were still spinning, now with thrusters pushing them closer to the planet with each second. Suddenly there was a load groaning sound, as if everything on the ship had gotten locked up and was grinding at its gears, and then two things happened.

The first, of course, was that Eli got the right gravity engine back online, and she was able to course correct and get them into a controlled descent. She was pretty proud of herself. And also slightly nauseous, now that the adrenaline rush was beginning to fade. A year ago, if Eli had left her alone at the helm of a ship in the middle of a crisis she would’ve spent the entire time castigating him rather than working with him to find a solution. Her family’s ways were easy to slide into, their expectations that those around them existed simply to serve. But Theo had changed all that—and brought her Eli, who changed everything.

The second thing had her calling for Eli at the top of her lungs. They had broken through the swirling mass of clouds and storms that was the outer atmosphere to…nothing. Not even a slight breeze, or a low hanging cloud. Below her stretched a grey-brown and dingy green world with the calmest skies she’d ever seen. The ground was remarkably flat, with jagged spires of rock dotting the landscape. Sometimes the spires stood alone, and others were clustered together like the fragmented remains of weathered plateaus. The preliminary data said the air was fairly similar to the Alliance worlds—implying they had terraformed this planet at some point. Looking down, she could see scraggly trees and small bushes seemed to be the dominant vegetation.

Eli came into the cabin a few moments after she got them hovering, while her hands feverishly began queuing biochemical scans and searching the EM bands for any sort of signal emanating from the world below.

“Air looks good. Some small plants. Lots of rocks,” Eli gathered. “You running a scan?”

“Air checks out. As for signs of life? Nothing human, at least not that I can see so far. Though there are some clusters of something to the northwest.”

“Well, let’s check it out,” Eli affirmed as he took back control of the ship and guided him into that direction. Kate had declared the ship was a _he_ not long after she boarded, proclaiming it was just as stubborn and vainglorious as the young man who commanded it. Actually, now that she thought of it, she had call him a boy, then. She winced.

“Few trace elements in the air, here. Nothing terrible, but some stuff I wouldn’t want us to be exposed to for months. Or the _Gambit_.”

As they arced over a cluster of those striated stone spires that went on for some time, Kate caught a glance of something large and dully metallic on the horizon. As they got closer, they both realized just how large the man-made structure was. It was easily as tall as any of the spires they’d seen to date, and stretched several stadiums wide. It wasn’t built into the surrounding landscape, though. As Eli brought the ship down several yards away from the structure for a landing, they saw what they’d taken for a ridge was actually an impact crater. Whatever this was, it crashed here.

“No messages since we cleared the atmosphere, Eli. No SOS, not even an automated ping from a downed satellite. The whole damned planet is quiet.”

“Maybe in there is the reason why. Reckon we ought to check it out.”

“Reckon we ought to, since we came all this way.”

They gathered some supplies in relative silence, each helping the other load up their packs before gathering their weapons. They kept their good ones on the ship, the ones Nate had designed for them, but what they brought was serviceable against anything Eli had ever seen. But he’d never seen an officially nonexistent planet before, either.

They opened the hatch and crouched as the somewhat dim daylight spilled into the cargo bay of the _Gambit_. There was the normal hiss of the ship depressurizing, but otherwise the world was silent around them. The surface had an odd hue, due to the multicolored clouds above filtering the light from the somewhat distance sun. Some thick, reedy bushes clustered not far away, appearing to be some weird cross between a fern and the bamboo native to the world they’d both been born in. Much of the rock Eli could see was covered in a grey-silver lichen, some of it over an inch thick. The air was drier than dry, though he could see a small pond not that far off. The rock got darker in the distance, a rich, mahogany compared to the bright, lichen-skinned area in which they had landed. A few steps out onto the surface of Skeiron revealed that gravity was also weaker than home. Nothing dire, but enough for each step to propel them just a bit further than it would have back home.

Approaching the downed structure, they started walking around its perimeter looking for entrances. Kate pointed out, silently, several webs on the structure and the pricker-covered bushes that they wove around. NO creatures were visible, but they couldn’t be too careful. They did eventually find a blown out observation window, and flicking on their lamps, headed into the structure. 

The ship, for lack of a better word, was filled with narrow corridors and many doors, all hermetically sealed. They did finally stumble across an open room. Or, at least, the hallway opened up into some sort of control room. They both took some time at various panels to try to read the controls. It was Kate who finally made the connection, after looking at what appeared to be a primitive version of the _Gambit_ ’s atmospheric analysis systems.

“Eli, I’m pretty sure this was one of the Alliance’s terraforming stations”

“What? How do you-”

“These three work stations are all variations on the ship’s atmospheric sensor arrays. This wasn’t a ship, it was an orbital station. For a planetoid this size, there must’ve been several of them. I bet if I glance over at the stations across the way here, you’re going to find some mechanism to adjust atmospheric conditions."

"Well, they didn’t do a great job, did they," Eli snorted. "Not much of an Alliance world if you can’t even break the outer atmosphere without risking life and limb."

"I doubt that was intentional. Something obviously happened here—I don’t think they finished whatever their program was." 

They left the work stations and continued along the branching corridors until it opened again. The rooms that radiated outwards from this latest control center were labeled _Coniferous, Deciduous, Amphibian, Insect, Arachnid_ , and _Exotics_. Many of the cryostasis tubes had shattered on impact, and the plant containers had dessicated husks of what had obviously once been forests. The animal tubes held plenty of their dead, but a surprising number of the slots for tubes were empty at the time of the crash. Kate imagined the animals had either never been loaded, or had already been introduced on the planet before the tragedy struck.

Eli backed into the room Kate was examining, sweeping his light from side to side. “I just checked out the _Exotics_ room. Place was pretty much empty. Lots of spots for the cryo tubes, but not many there. A few dead critters I didn’t even recognize died when this thing came down, but the rest either weren’t here or must’ve crawled out when containment failed.”

Kate’s nerves had her almost vibrating in place. She put a hand to her stomach, willing herself to unclench and relax. “The terraforming obviously failed. A partial mix of plants and animals were introduced, or broke free in the crash. If what we stole from my father is correct, that was back in 2267. That’s over 265 years ago, Eli. Almost 300 years to run wild, without the Alliance or anyone trying to micromanage every little biological process. And somehow it’s survived.”

“Clearly they terraformed the place enough to keep the basics running, but yeah. It’s sort of _shiny_.”

They started to make their way out of the labyrinth that was the terraforming complex, only taking a few wrong turns before they found themselves once again outside. Rustling in some of the bushes as they exited proved to be the first gentle breeze they’d witnessed since their arrival.

Once back aboard the _Gambit_ , they fired the smaller thrusters and decided to do some more exploring. Eli, especially, was eager to see what the cluster of lifeforms were on the scope to the Northwest. Gliding gently between the isolated spires for some time, it was clear that this portion of Skeiron had an almost uniform appearance. Spires, spire-clusters, small lakes, and reedy bushes and trees. Every so often there’d be a patch of the thick, silvery lichen that stood out like a mirror against the dark brown of the rock and what passed for soil. He wondered, idly, what the planet must’ve looked like before humanity had decided to alter it. 

As they got closer to where the sensors had first identified the heat signatures of warm-blooded lifeforms, he put down the ship and they once again headed out on foot. Peeking over a drumlin with some specs they’d picked up on their latest run from Londinium, Eli swore.

“What is it,” Kate tensed.

“Not sure. We need to get closer.” And so they did, hiding behind spires, peeking over ripples of rock that resembled sand dunes. As they got closer to the clearing, they both could see that Eli was right to be concerned.

Several robed figures with rebreathers woven into their hoods stalked about, each with a handheld sensor taking readings of the stalagmites that reached knee high, as well as the air. Clearly human, their voices were muffled through the breathing units. One of the figures appeared on the far horizon of the sunken clearing, awkwardly carrying something in his arms. He approached the group of three figures that seemed to be directing the others, and one of the directors removed what looked like a rock from the pile that man had acquired. Taking it in both hands, the director cracked the object open and something relatively large and slimey slithered to the rock-hewn ground in a torrent of mucous and albumen. The director looked down and then sharply at his cohorts before issuing some command in a clipped voice and running towards the shuttle that Eli only now noticed behind a series of larger stalagmites on the other side other clearing.

Another small wind drafted through the clearing, and Kate led Eli along the outside edge of the broken plateau, ducking from spire to spire in an effort to get a clear look at the craft of these other interlopers. She’d thought it impossible that only she and Eli had discovered this place, and her instincts had clearly been correct. As the shuttle slowly came into view, she wasn’t prepared for what she discovered.

At least one of the stalagmites in the front of the ship wasn’t rock at all, but a small mount of those shattered, stony eggs, the contents of which were spilled out all around the shells in a pool of gore. Why were these folks showing up on this blackrock, just to smash some eggs? But she quickly lost interest in that question, as Eli pointed to the side of the ship, it’s I.A.V. demarcation now clearly in view.

The Thunderbird-class shuttle was the _Nin-Shiang_ , and bore the mark of the Mugin Collective.

Her father’s company.

Above, the swirling clouds darkened, and the silence was broken by a thunder of wings.


End file.
